Ours is a military vehicle with crushable structure under the floor, and a blast-deflection wedge at the side of the passenger compartment. To protect the occupants from mine explosions under and beside the vehicle.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,255,034 shows a “mine-detonation-resistant understructure for a vehicle.” The information of interest is about previous armoring, found in column 4: “Usually, the armoring against land mine blasts are multilayer structures.” We have a related construction. His criticism is, “which require a massive support arrangement which is both heavy and expensive.” We circumvent this problem by making the spacers of the multilayer, the frame of our vehicle. That replaces the weight and expense of a conventional frame.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,984 in his background text similarly cites, “superposed plates and hollow layers, such as air layers.” This again suggests the layered structure in ours. In addition, he writes, “damping elements to reduce and absorb the mine effect are provided in an intermediate floor.” Our crushable spacers between the several plates seem to be an example of that too. There is no mention of combining the multilayer with a wedge at the edge of the vehicle.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,533,781 shows a Humvee-style vehicle with “panel, air gap, resilient material and flooring” at the bottom of the passenger compartment. Panels and air gaps actually describe our crushable structure better than the more generic “layers” used in the two prior references; but our arrangement is different.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,382,862 in its FIG. 2 has a wedge-shaped fold 25, 36 in body sheet metal at the edge of the passenger compartment. This being somewhat less than armor plate, and not reinforced, it might collapse under a mine explosion of any likely size.
The strength of our crushable structure makes it usable as the vehicle frame. Spacers are vertically aligned with other spacers, thereby combining their webs to form a deep beam for the frame. Panels to catch the detonation wave are interleaved with the stringers. The panels act as flanges to the beam web, thereby stiffening the beam for use in the frame. No prior example was found.